Metro 2033 Author: The Witcher Author Is Totally Wrong, The Games Made The Series Popular

The Witcher creator Andrzej Sapkowski continues to have a conflicted relationship with CD Projekt RED’s renown game adaptation. A while ago he said that he doesn’t have anything against games and admitted he was stupid to sell all the rights to CDPR, which then made excellent games. However, he keeps saying that CDPR’s trilogy spoiled his books’ market and that he made the games popular, not the other way around.

I think that he’s totally wrong, and that he’s an arrogant motherfucker.

Without the gaming franchise, the Witcher series would never get this crazy international readership that it has. And it’s not just about the gamers but the gaming press and the buzz it creates, and just the feeling of something great and massive and impressive coming out. This got people hooked. He would remain a local Eastern European phenomenon without this, but he would never break into the West. And the same goes for my Metro books.

It happened so that the game developers were among the first readers. The creative lead of 4A Games, Andrei Proharov, was sent a link to the website by some of his friends, and he read it overnight and thought it was a perfect story for their next game.

I decided to use this opportunity to tell my own kind of story, and I was not at all judging video games as a danger to my precious property. Quite the contrary, I thought that it’s a great opportunity to promote the entire IP. And that was exactly the way it worked.

They did a great job. I think Metro 2033 is the world’s first lyrical, sentimental and philosophical 3D shooter.

There might be a generational conflict at play here – after all, Sapkowski is 68 while Glukhovsky is 37, which means he was born into the gaming revolution era.